Profiles

Note: The following story was written by the great Imade Borha, who also pens an occasional Music & Mental Health column for us. It appeared as the cover story in today’s issue of 72 Hours. If you dig, you can follow Imade on Twitter here.

On a frigid Thursday night in December, lovers of electronic dance music packed Café Nola at a celebration of Future Sound’s fifth anniversary. The monthly event transformed Café Nola into a dance club with strobe lights, projected video clips, and a wall of LED lights behind the performing DJs.

Stepping into Nola was like stepping into a trunk rattling car. The hard hitting sound reverberated in your chest.

After Andrew Gumas, known as Gumdrop, opened the event, Jared “kcik” Bileski mixed trap hip-hop with EDM in a way that would make a freestyle rapper salivate. The music’s vocals, which varied between mumble rap and chopped and screwed, took a backseat to intricate rhythms of syncopated hi hats and double-time beats. Old met new in remixed standards like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” There was a sense of anticipation as the remix progressed. When kcik dropped the beat, one man jumped in synchronized timing.

People’s enjoyment of the music was as diverse as kcik’s set. They hugged each other, huddled by the DJ table to dance, or just stood and nodded their heads to the music in approval.

Kcik stayed focused throughout it all, turning knobs with the focus of a surgeon.

“It’s a bigger turn-out than I thought,” said Future Sound founder Derrick Miller as he made his way through the crowd. “I’m loving this.”

Screams of delight could be heard later when Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot” came on. Some people shed their winter coats on the back of chairs to join the small but faithful group of dancers.

Five years ago, few people attended Future Sound. Miller, who’s been an EDM fan since the mid-’80s, simply played music off his laptop with the support of fellow DJ friends Ray “Sigmund Void” Naegle and Chris “Synapsis” Heyrend.

“I knew it was going to take some time to build up,” Miller said in a group interview with Future Sound DJs before the show, “because I had done these events before, and it always takes a while to get something going.”

Gumas came along the following year and felt Future Sound could be made better, he said. Gumas, who previously tried to form a non-sanctioned DJ club at Hood College, teamed up with Miller to promote Future Sound in the Frederick area. Miller started diversifying Future Sound DJs by sharing booking tasks with friends like Gumas. “We wanted to make our town feel like a cool place for kids our age,” Gumas said. “They’re all driving down two, three times a week [to D.C.], going to clubs. We wanted to make it local and be our thing.”

For many Frederick residents, EDM comes with a learning curve. This music can be hard to define since EDM is often an umbrella genre encompassing pop, hip-hop and rock through incorporating synthesized sounds.

Many Future Sound DJs have a memorable first experience with EDM, where they were overwhelmed by what they were hearing. Gumas’ first time came when he was invited to step inside an acquaintance’s car. “He rolls the windows up, I’m like, alright, we’re all going to die. He turns up the stereo … it’s called Mt. Eden dubstep. He said, ‘Just listen. Just listen, guys. This is the new s—. This is Euro right here. This is what they’re doing in Europe. It’s called EDM,’” Gumas said. “It shocked me at first. I thought it was abrasive,” but when Gumas researched the genre, his opinion changed. “And then I realized that I really like it. The rest is history.”

EDM newcomers can also be a bit jarred when they first enter Nola’s doors. “Sometimes you watch it happen, like the transformation,” Gumas said. “You’ll see them looking to all their friends for approval. ‘What is this? I don’t know, what is this?’ They’re looking around, and they start making fun of it.”

Kevin Maddert, who occasionally DJs as JustKev, added what happens next. “And instead of leaving, they go primal and subsume themselves in it. You turn around and these people are going insane on the dance floor.”

With a $5 cover charge, Future Sound barely breaks even, but less focus on making money means more room to take risks. “This Future Sound thing is a labor of love,” Miller said. “So we’ll have a famous DJ from D.C. or Baltimore come in, and another time we’ll have some unknown bedroom producer who feels like their music deserves to be heard.”

A DJ set at Future Sound can include a Backstreet Boys remix alongside trance or surfer rock. Undoubtedly, each month offers listeners a chance to hear something they’ve never heard before.

Future Sound creates future for EDM in Frederick was last modified: January 12th, 2017 by Colin McGuire

Note: The below story was written by Kelsi Loos. She is currently the bass player in the Baltimore band Heavenly Nobodies. You can check them out on Facebook here, and if you are so inclined, you can also check out all the great things Kelsi has going on through her Twitter account here.

The Get Right Band, a rock band with Middletown roots, will debut its new album at Alive@Five tonight, a downtown happy hour along Carroll Creek. The band, based in North Carolina, approached the record, “Bass Treble Angel Devil,” with high ambitions.

“We really wanted to do something bold. We really wanted to do something big and adventurous,” singer and guitarist Silas Durocher said.

The record is a blending of many different styles, from rock, blues, funk and reggae.

“We really don’t like to be limited by genres,” Durocher said. “We really just kind of follow the muse.”

Bass player and vocalist Jesse Gentry summed up the theme of the album saying it’s about living every day like it’s your last. The goal of the album, recorded at the Eagle Room in Weaverville, North Carolina, was to translate the band’s high-energy live sound into a recording.

The Get Right Band spends a lot of time on the road, Durocher said. For some bands, recording in the studio after working the songs out in a live environment can be challenging.

“It’s a really different artform in the studio,” Durocher said.

The band wanted to record as many tracks live, as a group, as possible. That way, the singer said, the sound would center around the trio and be true to the band.

However, there is some studio magic on some songs. The lead off song, “Satisfied Man,” was recorded using a drum loop as well as live drum tracks to make for a bigger sound.

“We wanted to make that sound huge,” Durocher said.

The band frequently plays their songs in different styles live, Gentry said. It was a bit of a challenge to pick the version they wanted to release, but recording a record was a good way for it to settle on a final version for each song and cut back on jams, to focus the songs.

“The album was a great way for us to just trim the fat,” Gentry said.

The record release show will be something of a homecoming for Gentry and Durocher. The two met at Middletown High School (Durocher in the class of 2003, Jesse graduating in ’02) and have played music together off and on since then. Last winter, drummer JC Mears joined the Middletown natives.

While the band members have been living outside of Maryland for over a decade, they still have family and friends in Frederick and enjoy the chance to come back, timing performances for when they will be able to see the most family and friends.

“We come back and we play a couple times a year, at Cafe Nola mostly,” Durocher said. “It really is a homecoming.”

Gentry was pleased to see a cultural growth in Frederick since his childhood, he said, and he was looking forward to experiencing the Alive@Five concert on Carroll Creek.

“We love coming back to Frederick,” he said, “Now I feel like it’s really been revitalized. … Frederick has blossomed.”

Check out The Get Right Band at 5 p.m. Thursday night along Carroll Creek as part of this week’s Alive@Five. They’ll be releasing their latest set, Bass Treble Angel Devil. And no, you won’t want to miss it.

Gettin’ Right With The Get Right Band was last modified: August 27th, 2014 by fnpdigital

In 1967, the great Latin American author Gabriel García Márquez published “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a work a lot of literary historians still consider his most masterful within an output, it should also be noted, not otherwise devoid of masterpieces. The thing is soaking wet with metaphor.

From its main protagonist, José Arcadio Buendía, creating the city of Macondo (hey there, Colombia!), to the countless uses of yellow and gold colors (what’s up, wealth!), all the way to a mirror-filled, glass city (how you doin’, predetermined fate!), it essentially adds up to one, big meditation on how Latin America was set up to fail.

It’s a weird book for a father to give his child. Sure, it has its share of magic, whimsical undertones, but that thing is absolutely loaded with heavy ideas, heavy interpretations of how redundant society can be. Plus, due to its weighted use of symbolism, there’s really no telling how any single person might internalize all that’s written, especially if that person is only beginning to get her feet wet when it comes to consuming literature. But then again, maybe the dad wanted to send a message. Maybe the dad was never particularly concerned with whatever “weird” meant, in the first place.

Or, at least in this case, maybe the dad was Johnny Cash.

“He told me once that if I didn’t read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ that I could not be his daughter,” Rosanne Cash, now all grown up, explained in a recent phone interview before breaking into a boisterous, gasping laugh.

So, how did she respond?

“Well,” she related between chuckles with a hint of faux sternness, “I read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’”

And she hasn’t looked back. With a lifelong affinity for the written word, Cash, who is coming to town as part of the 2014 Frederick Reads celebration (this year’s theme is The Music of Language) with a series of appearances and book signings on April 1 — only after performing at the Weinberg Center for the Arts with her husband, producer John Leventhal, on March 31 — has been known for displaying poetic prowess time and again.

How so? Well, before publishing “Composed: A Memoir” in 2010 and landing a spot on the New York Times best-seller list, she also penned three books, 1997’s “Bodies of Water,” 2001’s “Songs Without Rhyme: Prose By Celebrated Songwriters” and a 2006 kids’ book, “Penelope Jane: A Fairy’s Tale.” Her work has appeared in between the pages of almost every major print media outlet the country has, from Rolling Stone to New York Magazine to the New York Times, to Newsweek, and all the way to The Oxford American, even. All told, she’s about as comfortable with a pen as she is with a guitar.

This continues to surprise her in the present day. Growing up with a father almost always on the road, trying to get a career in country music off the ground, and a mother deemed apathetic at best when it came to reading, the Grammy-winning songwriter acknowledged how much she had to work just to find her life’s second passion.

“My dad was a great reader himself, and that was a place we connected when I was older,” Cash reflected. “But he wasn’t there enough to read to me, and my mother really did not care about books. I was the kid who asked to be dropped at the library on Saturdays.

“He liked novels about the Old West,” she added, referring to her famous father. “But he also loved great literature … and he loved ancient text — he read Josephus.”

As for her dad’s day job … well, it’s safe to say the 58-year-old has made the original Man In Black proud. Her most recent musical effort, “The River & The Thread,” released in January on Blue Note, has achieved wide acclaim from fans and critics alike.

Written mostly with her husband, it’s a sonic road trip through the best of Southern roots music, drawing from gospel, country, bluegrass and soul textures with as much self-reverence as self-doubt. Its haunting intonations and next-level introspection has led many taste-makers to label it her best in years (if not ever), and that’s probably because it actually is. In fact, the record is something on which she plans to lean heavily during her performance at the Weinberg.

“John is like a band in himself,” Cash explained. “They won’t be exactly as the record in a duo performance, obviously, but there can be several subtle interpretations of a song. I love finding those subtleties in an acoustic performance. … Sometimes the lyrics come more to the front and center.”

It would make sense if the 13-time Grammy nominee might prefer to have words stand tall above all else onstage — the singer has been using letters with the precision of a heart-surgeon for almost four decades now. It’s a passion that fits in well both with her persona as an author, as well as her persona as a musical artist. And fortunately for readers and listeners both, she plans on bringing the best of each side to Frederick.

“I’ve done several literary events like this since my book came out in 2010, and I really enjoy them a lot,” Cash noted when asked about the Frederick Reads program. “I enjoy being with a community of writers and serious readers, and then, of course, the theme was perfect for me. So, you know, I was thrilled to do it. With the cuts in music and art in schools, and with the closing of libraries and the devaluing of in-depth reading, with technology with a kind of surface-attention, it’s hugely important to me. These events are a bomb. They’re also encouraging, to see that people still really care about these things.

“It’s just my nature to be kind of obsessed with words,” the singer continued, sounding as though she was thinking aloud. “And I think some people just have that innate love of language. I love the English language, I love how Shakespeare puts a phrase together, I love how words feel in your mouth, I love the rhythm of words. I think that’s one reason I’m a songwriter — because words naturally have melody, so you attach them to an obvious melody.

“And,” she added without a hint of irony aimed at what she was about to say: “It’s just doubly satisfying.”

Rosanne Cash: Doubly Satisfying was last modified: March 27th, 2014 by Colin McGuire